Stupeflix releases awesome API to generate 1,000s of videos on the fly

Stupeflix is a French startup which has come up with a radically new way of creating, processing and editing online video. On the face of it, Stupeflix automatically generates professional looking videos out of pictures, music and videos. If that sounds like Animoto, then you are right, but there are key differences under the hood which make Stupeflix totally different and potentially of much greater value. And I don’t say that lightly.

Where Animoto and Stupeflix completely diverge is in their approach and business model. Stupeflix has effectively come up with an API which describes video, text, using and pictures in flash video based on an XML description. So instead of actually editing the video you edit the XML. That means you can edit video just by changing a tag, or by telling their engine to run a different kind of effect for every video you wants to generate. iMovie would create just one video, and requires a meaty package to edit how it’s presented. With Stupiflix you just edit the XML, with tags like “rotate” or “fade left”. Today Stupeflix launches the web interface to its video editing web application.

Because Stupeflix was built first as an API service, it is designed to create videos from any kind of content on the fly. The API was developed in a similar way to how video games are programmed – as much of the prgramming took place directly on GPUs. As a demostration of its power, they’ve generated over 1,000 videos direct from Wikipedia content, automatically, in under 60 minutes.

Some practical applications of Stupeflix are pretty enticing. An Ecommerce web site could effectively suck in its inventory of pictures and information automatically to create a huge library of product videos – which are a great way to lift sales. The resulting video can increase video SEO, and a site’s reach on YouTube for instance. Another use might be to take a Twitter stream or a term on Twitter search about a breaking news story and create an updating or perhaps live video stream, adding in advertisements, logos etc. You could also take the Google TV Adsense interface, import some pictures and create video with Google ads embedded.

The business model is is to sell each video for a small fee – not unlike like Amazon Web Services as in: the more videos you produce the less you pay. The aim is to do what the Google Maps API did for maps, but do it for video. Their team is ex of DailyMotion and Exalead.

One Stupeflix customer already includes Orange Vallée, a subsidiary from the French mobile operator Orange, which will use Stupeflix in their upcoming consumer website Memory Life.